Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
The air split in two.
A chasm swirled into existence next to Vasilios’s body. It widened, a great maw swallowing air and sound into its depth. Reyna staggered away from it and ran towards the others, arms shielding her face. The Silence worshippers who were still standing ran to their cars and fled.
Taran was yelling something, but Cadenza couldn’t hear him over the ear-drum-sucking black hole. Her hair whipped her face, obscuring her vision, so that when Vasilios’s corpse began to dissolve, she thought it was a mirage.
But no. His fingertips fragmented, and his palms followed.
The chasm ate the pieces. His body exploded into puffs of dust—head, chest, hips—until all of him disappeared into the roaring hole of nothing.
The dead cultists crumbled to ash and followed their priest. The tangle of curse flew up from the ground and disappeared after them.
The maw clamped its jaws shut and vanished.
Sound returned. The stream down the hill by the bridge. A car horn on Mono Way. Gasping breaths from her friends.
Cadenza clutched Taran’s arm. Reached up to his face. She tried to speak, to tell him the curse was gone, he was free. But her lungs were heaving and her throat was swollen and she couldn’t get the word out.
He knew anyway. His heart pounded strong and his bodhran song ran unrestricted. Taran’s tears ran with hers, and he just nodded his head and pulled her into his arms.
She gulped in a breath. “Is everyone else ok?”
Wide-eyed, Reyna’s hand trembled around the tuning fork. “I just killed someone. I murdered a person.”
Cadenza ran to her, but Cyrus got there first and tucked her face into his shoulder, holding her close. “No. You did your job.” He pulled back and gave her a half smile. “At least, part of your job.”
“And Vasilios Pearce will return. Not with that name, or that face, but his master will send him into the world again. Of that you may be sure.”
Cadenza spun. Two beings stood where the wedding arch—flattened by the fight and the wind—had been. A woman with a crown of red blossoms. And a man with antlers.
The memories she’d shoved away driving on the racetrack with the Ferrari came crashing back.
These two beings watching her in her backyard the first time the earthsong had tried to escape through her.
She had fought it then, not wanting to make Ilaria angrier with her, and refused to let the music out. The man and the woman had vanished.
“I know you,” she whispered.
Drostan spoke at the same time. “Oh, look who finally deigned to grace us with their presence.”
The woman shot him a fierce look. “You will watch your tone, Guardian.”
“Or you’ll what?” he challenged. “Leave us on our own for hundreds of years again?”
The antlered man motioned for quiet. “Peace, Guardian.”
Cadenza looked to Taran for answers. “Who are they?”
“The Messengers,” he explained. “Rowan and Acantha.” He pointed to the man and then the woman.
“They’re the Messengers?” She turned back to the two. “Why were they in my backyard as a kid?”
The flower-crowned woman looked Cadenza up and down, as if measuring. As a child, Cadenza had wondered if the woman had been some kind of judge. It didn’t look like she’d changed.
The antlered man, Rowan, raised an eyebrow at his companion. She sniffed and looked away. Apparently, Cadenza didn’t rank any more approval from the woman now than when she was five.
“Children of Fate,” Rowan’s voice carried across the churned field. “Listen well. Time grows short. The Fates have no more Thread with which to weave, and the music wanes—too long has the earth been cut off from the light. You must end this feud and return to your duties.”
“End?” Thomas choked on the word. “Will the death of my wife end? Will the Fates bring her back? I demand restitution. This boy,” he pointed a finger at Taran, “must pay!”
“He has paid,” Rowan said. “You have all paid. Put it behind you.”
“I will not!”
Acantha fixed Thomas with a glare like ice. “You will do the job you have been tasked, Thomas Learmonth of Ercildoun, or you will be removed from your place and another appointed in your stead.” Her voice fell like a thorned whip. Thomas quailed and fell to his knees.
“The Crown must be found. We will need all of you in order to do this.” Rowan stepped forward.
“We do not pretend healing the wounds between you will be easy or quick. But it must be done. To begin the process, all of you must renew your dedications. Or, in the case of some of you, make them for the first time.” He glanced at Cadenza and Reyna with the barest hint of a smile.
“Thomas Learmonth,” Rowan continued. “Will you use your sight in service to the Fates and as custodian of the Cave of Decision?”
The seer tried to stagger to his feet, blood staining the ground from his gunshot wound. Cadenza caught his arm, helping him up, and Thomas limped a few steps forward. Tears carved channels of grief into his cheeks, but he answered with a steady voice. “Aye.”
Rowan nodded. Acantha approached Drostan and his sons. “Drostan Norroway, will you use your gifts in service to the Fates and to defend your fellow Children of Fate?”
Drostan’s chest heaved, and he glared at Thomas, anger sizzling off him, twisting his features. Cadenza held her breath, afraid he would refuse, but Reyna laid a hand on his arm.
“Drostan,” she said, voice quiet. “We have a job to do.”
He wrenched his gaze back to Acantha. “Aye.”
She repeated the question and answer with Ruairi and Cyrus. Rowan came to Taran.
“Taran Norroway—”
“Let me guess. Same question?” Taran’s eyes sparkled as he bounced on the balls of his feet.
Rowan sucked his cheeks, repressing a laugh. “I’ve missed you, my cheeky friend.”
Acantha frowned, the severity of her expression at odds with the scarlet bouquet around her head. “Your son is as unruly as ever, Drostan.”
Taran winked. “Just trying to lighten the mood. Everyone’s so somber, you’d think we’d just fought an epic battle or unraveled a centuries-old curse or somesuch.”
“Taran Norroway,” she snapped. “Do you want to resume your place or not?”
He wove his fingers through Cadenza’s. Bodhran danced around her, fresh as spring.
“Aye.”
Rowan nodded. “That’ll do.” He called Reyna and Cadenza forward. Starlight glinted off his antlers, and the deep red mark on his forehead gleamed. “You have each shown yourself worthy of your gifts and are offered a place in the pattern of Fate.”
A night breeze fluted through Acantha’s flower circlet, sending a heady scent over the group as she faced Reyna. “Reyna Weyland, will you use your gifts in service to the Fates and the defense of your fellow Children of Fate?”
Reyna lifted her chin. A gold sheen rippled across her skin. “I will.”
“Cadenza Cavalieri,” Rowan said. “Will you use your song in service to the Fates to aid in leading humankind to growth?”
Cadenza’s heart pounded so hard at first she thought it was Taran’s. The earthsong rushed her from all sides. She greeted it as a partner and made her choice.
“I will.”
Taran drew his first breath as a man uncursed and reinstated. Conflicting scents met his nostrils—caramel, blood, oil leaking from the Audi, the clean, spring water smell of the Messengers—but he felt clear and unrestrained as moonlight.
Rowan drew him and Cadenza aside. “I would speak to you both.”
Cadenza interrupted before he could continue. “Yes, I want to talk to you too. You two came to me when I was kid, didn’t you? You were in my backyard the first time the music wanted me to use it. Ilaria said I was crazy.”
“Yes.” Rowan glanced over his shoulder at his counterpoint and leaned closer.
“The rules state that you get one chance to choose whether you will listen to the music, and that day was it. When you kept it bottled up, Acantha considered you failed. But I saw potential in you. And we have so much work to be done. I won’t admit it in public”—he winked—“but let’s say a wee bird planted the idea of answering Drostan’s ad in your agent’s head. ”
“I guess sometimes Fate needs a little push.” Cadenza laughed, but Taran’s eyes popped.
She didn’t understand the magnitude of what Rowan had just confessed.
The Messengers never interfered. They were exactly what their title suggested, not agents to act for themselves.
At least, that was what he’d always thought.
“Rowan, you cheated!” Taran said in awe. So many hundreds of years, and there were still new things to learn about the twists of Fate.
The Messenger winced and fidgeted with an antler. “Don’t tell Acantha. She is such a stickler for protocol.”
“No worries there, mate.” Taran cast a glance over his shoulder at the flower-crowned woman and shuddered.
Rowan straightened. “My purpose in speaking to you however is that I would not leave you believing the Fates have been ignorant of your situation or your suffering.”
Some of Taran’s awe dimmed. He’d just been released from his prison; he didn’t need to be reminded of how they’d left him there for so long because he deserved it.
“As I think Cadenza has understood by now, your choices affect the pattern.”
Taran raised an eyebrow at her. “What does that mean?”
“Taran, there’s space between the Threads!” She grinned and explained what she’d learned during the fight, and how she’d unraveled the curse.
Choices and Fate. Together. His decision, made despite his despair, to follow Cadenza’s hope—to try to regain the oracles, to try handfasting—those choices had altered the weavings of the Fates. More to learn of the twists of Fate indeed. The night wasn’t yet half gone, but he felt like the dawn.
“However,” Rowan added when Cadenza had finished.
“That also means that the Fates must wait until someone chooses to accept the path that will accomplish their plans. There have been many potential Spinners over the generations who could have unraveled the knot you carried. But none chose to accept their place in the plan.”
The sunrise in Taran’s chest dimmed. “Are you telling me I could have been free from all of this ages ago if someone had simply chosen differently? I had to sit here in hell waiting on someone to hurry up and decide to use their gift?”
How many nights had he paced his prison unnecessarily? How many days had he spent in oblivion? Because no one chose to step up to the job they were tasked.
“Are you angry, Guardian?” Rowan asked quietly. “I merely intended to help you understand you were not forgotten by the Fates.”
Taran tightened his fingers around Cadenza’s, remembering each time he had transformed back to human to find her waiting for him. “No, I’m not angry,” he said. “It was worth the wait.”
“Speaking of waiting.” The corners of Rowan’s eyes crinkled in a smile. “I understand we interrupted a wedding?”
“Aye,” Taran said. He kissed Cadenza's forehead. “And it’s been a great deal more than five minutes by now, don’t you think?”
She laughed. “Definitely. Rowan, what would you think about officiating?”
“It would be my honor.”
Sunlight whistled through the bedroom window, singing a waking song across Cadenza’s eyelids. She smiled and snuggled deeper in the blankets, reveling in the memory of the most unusual wedding she’d ever been to. Hers.
When she’d brought out the “handfasting fabric” it dusted to powder, just as Vasilios had, and dissipated into the wind. So she’d called on the meadow song—moon, stars, tree, and stream—and Spun a Thread to tie their lives and fates together.
The bed was empty of drumsong this morning, but a trail of bodhran notes played out the window. She threw on some clothes and went to find her husband.
Inside the garage, the drumbeats tickled her skin. Outside, they crescendoed to an ocean, exulting in their freedom. She swam to the heartbeat at the center and found Taran at the eastern fence where he’d first told her about the curse. The hole in the chain-link was still there.
He stood facing the sunrise, bare chested and feet planted in the earth. Arms outstretched, he breathed in the light. Gold limned his skin, haloing his hair. And he laughed.
It was the most perfect song Cadenza had ever heard.
She stole her arms around his waist from behind and traced the lines of muscle on his stomach with her fingernails.
“Good morning.”
Taran covered her arms with his. “Good morning.”
She brushed her lips over his back, feeling the hum of music in his chest, under her feet, and flowing from the sunrise crowning the hills.
The Silence would be back. Tomorrow, they had a meeting with the Norroways, Reyna, and Thomas to figure out how, out of all the inhabitants of the earth, to find the one capable of becoming the next Crown.
And Cadenza had a lifetime of music ahead of her, although she would be using her music for a far different purpose than she ever imagined.
But today was theirs.
The golds and pinks of dawn melted into the brilliant blue of a new morning. Cadenza rose up on tiptoes to kiss Taran’s ear.
“So, where do you want to go today?”